It was a time when all men ages 16 to 60 were ordered to volunteer for battle. The wealthy were wanting for bread, and salt was so rare that people boiled the dirt from smokehouse floors to get it. Union and Confederate hands wrenched the city from each other 40 times. Though Florence was hard-hit, scarred, and bruised by the Civil War, many historic places still stand, preserved for your tour-like Pope’s Tavern & Museum filled with antiquities, relics, and stories.

One of the area’s oldest buildings-once a stagecoach stop, tavern and inn, hospital and command center for both Northern and Southern armies-the museum houses a wealth of local and Civil War history. A rare Kennedy Long Rifle, a Confederate Colonel’s uniform, a vertically strung piano-one of only four ever made.

Located in downtown Florence on Jackson’s Military Road carved out by Andrew Jackson himself as a shortcut to move supply wagons and artillery from Nashville to New Orleans.